Monday, December 29, 2014

I'm excited to announce that the Sitecore Courier module is now available at Chocolatey Gallery - https://chocolatey.org/packages/sitecore-courier! This is the first Sitecore-related Chocolatey package and it also contains a few improvements to the tool.

From now, all you need to install Sitecore Courier is to type choco install sitecore-courier in command line or PowerShell console.

Path to Sitecore.Courier.Runner.exe will be added to the environment variables, so that you'll be able to run it from the command line as well.

One more thing - it will register a shell extension that allows easy packaging of both items and files. Try it out - that's a great time saver. Simply right-click any folder and choose "Package with Sitecore Courier" option. (You might need to restart your computer before this option appears).

Thursday, December 18, 2014

When you hear the words "Application Lifecycle Management", the first thing that comes into your mind is likely Build / Deploy / Test workflow. But there is one thing which is missing here, and it is called "Monitoring".

Once you've deployed the website, you'll see that website performance may vary a lot depending on many known and unknown factors. They can be caused by both external (such as bot traffic, daily visits spikes, membership providers (CRM, AD) performance) and internal (different Sitecore jobs, scheduled tasks, automations, etc.) factors.

How do you know how the website performs? It's not something that you'll find in Sitecore logs, and it's not one hundred percent clear from IIS logs either.